At the start of every new year, we get a lot of inquiries for website redesigns. Like many other new year’s resolutions and reboots, this is probably not the most effective approach to getting better results.

Show Notes:- Consider objectives and your audience- Church Websites Looking to Increase Visitors- Senior Living Websites Looking to Increase Residents- Analyze your traffic and conversions- Think about your content in terms of playlists- Consolidate, lengthen, and (maybe) diversify your content- Consider every page having a video- Coach your clients- Build your list and monetize more with email- Be present and available for your clients

Make the logo bigger, moves at the speed of content these days. If you're publishing here,:

Speaker 2:

0:05

you're invisible. Welcome to make the logo bigger. Understanding the language that your audience averages to search for things on Google is not exactly how you talk about your product or service, and so that research component is fundamentally critical podcast that takes you behind the scenes of a marketing agency talking or thinking about marketing. Everybody needs to go back to the basics for a little bit and just get back to the core little individual aspects of marketing and do some of the simple things better from two guys that get paid to do this stuff on a daily basis. Don't be what do you expect people to expect you to be the expectations, right? So if you just focus on why you're doing what you're doing and tell that story. If people are going to pick up on that passion, here's your host, Bill Rice. Oh, we don't.:

Speaker 2:

0:49

We don't need that because we get referrals, right? But at the very core of that and that referral was generated by some form of marketing and understanding the language that your audience will leverage is to search for things on Google is not exactly how you talk about your product or service, and so that research component is fundamentally critical and know the obligatory legal disclosure. Though rice is the founder and CEO of Colorado, a marketing and design agency might. Carol is the head of growth at nutshell, a crm software provider. All opinions expressed by bill are definitely the opinions of Kalydeco. All opinions expressed by Mike are his own opinions expressed by guests of this podcast could be right or wrong, who knows? This podcast is for informational purposes and has a reasonable probability of making your marketing better. And now this week's episode, Hey, so we are back:

Speaker 1:

1:40

too long hiatus. I've got Mike Carroll here with me from nutshell and this is bill rice from Kalydeco and the whole show is make the logo bigger. So if you've been a longtime listener, apologize for that break in action. And I was just a little bit of holidays, a little bit of laziness, but we're back. Hey Mike, how you doing? I'm good. Bill. How are you buddy? I'm doing wonderful. Doing wonderful. When was the last time we recorded an episode? Oh, I should've looked at that. I don't have my thing up here, but it's probably two months. Yeah. Yeah. It's got to be at the minimum I've been. I've been busy at work so I, I feel bad as well. But the, but the laziness comment is probably the more accurate comment. Of course, my wife has also had me running around preparing the new nursery.:

Speaker 1:

2:25

I'm an outsider. You can probably hear the banging in the background if you can. I apologize. I'm at home today and uh, it was a little more work being done on the house even though the baby's due in two weeks. Why not run it right up to the deadline? Because that's the way you should do that. I was going to say, are you. So are you building like, oh, this is a boy, right? This is not a. not a girl. So there's no castles or anything or snow castles or no? Yeah, no, no. Rumpelstiltskin outside, like play arenas or anything to build. We're just adding a guest for him to the house so that when parents and grandparents come to stay and all that kind of stuff, they have a place to be. And so does the child. So.:

Speaker 3:

3:01

Nice. Well I'm excited for you but I'm glad that all of mine are talking and walking and driving and going to college. I don't know. It's got it's own little things. But uh, anyway, so let's jump into what we're going to talk about today. So it's 2019 and as the kind of the new year actually as the old year rolled out in the new year rolled in at Kalydeco, we were getting tons of requests as we often do about website redesign and it just seems to be new year people are thinking about their websites are thinking about their online channel. And so often when that's not performing the way they want it to or to expect, their natural reaction is just a blow everything up and redesigned the website. Why is that? Why do you think that is? I, you know, I think it's more of A. I think it's sort of a knowledge thing.:

Speaker 3:

3:50

Like people just assume that. I think there's two things. One, they assume that's the way to kind of fix, like if it's not working, then we need to redesign everything. But I think the other thing, and this is kind of where the lack of knowledge comes into play, is that because of modern content management systems, things like wordpress, you really don't have to tear it down, right? You could just incrementally, you can completely sort of redesign things incrementally without having to tear it all down. And then I think the other knowledge factor there that's almost dangerous, we'll talk about this in a little bit, is you can actually break some things that are going right. So quarterly. That's what terrifies me the most about any website redesign with her. I was on the agency side or like now that I'm on the quote unquote, the client side or working for a company is um, I never worry about, you know, the aesthetic or all that kind of stuff in a redesign.:

Speaker 3:

4:42

It's going to look nice, so to speak, you know, that's a question of budget time and effort, but like what, what about my search engine optimization? Am I going to break like what traffic am I going to ruin? Um, particularly when it comes to redesigning blogs, uh, which we can talk about a little later, which something that like my mind is focused on. Uh, and also something to think about. I think differently when we talk about websites, strategies and um, and redesigning a website like depending on your objective, like if you really want to read it on your website or like you want to redesign the blog, which while for most people is one in the same, they're really two different things with two different objectives in two different styles and like all that kind of stuff. So maybe we can take some time to talk about that a little bit.:

Speaker 3:

5:19

I'd love to pick your brain on a couple of things. Yeah, definitely. Let's do that. So the way I kind of broke this topic down as I was sort of thinking about it and the article that will write kind of as a follow onto this is I wanted to sort of think through maybe a few different strategies but more like a framework of kind of how you, you should start thinking about if, if it's popped into your mind, I need to redesign my website, uh, take your through self through this process first and see if you can get kinda the, uh, the performance or the objectives met by taking a look at a few of these things. So the first thing, and you've heard me say it a couple of times, but objectives and goals, and you mentioned this too, I think the first step in all cases is really sit down for a moment, step back from the website.:

Speaker 3:

6:04

Don't, don't think about that for a moment. And really consider what are your objectives, what are you, what are you trying to accomplish through your online channel? And of course the website is probably going to be the central platform in that mix. I'm thinking about what you're trying to do there. Um, and then the second thing it's kind of related but often not thought about is that you know, who is your audience? And we hear that oftentimes you mentioned people like, Oh, who's my audience, who's my target audience? Or that sort of thing. But in this context, what I'm talking about is do some analysis and evaluation of who's actually coming to your website now, like who is your current audience? It may not be who you want to be talking to, but you should know who's coming to that website right now and do some of that analysis:

Speaker 1:

6:48

a hundred percent either. The other thing that you mentioned, which I think some people make this mistake a lot when you're talking about objectives for your website. If that objective, like when you step back and like, no, we just need a better website, then you're not asking the right question. So like stop yourself before you go blow up your whole website, like you're suggesting bar, which I totally agree with. And then double down on really what you're trying to accomplish. And when people talk about things we're wanting to accomplish, like do you need more leads? Is that the issue? Are you trying to communicate a different value prop about your product or service a, these are objectives I need a better website is not an objective that's a nebulous end state to which you will never reach a because everybody needs a better website at all times. It's a thing that be always be changing and evolving with you and your business on a regular basis and people make that mistake a lot as well.:

Speaker 3:

7:36

It's really important to go through that step and even maybe talk to some of your stakeholders about those objectives and the audience and that sort of thing. Because I, I kinda on one recent client I did, um, kind of, uh, talk through or evaluation. I talked to some of their salespeople and I was surprised because usually, you know, marketing to sales, there's some tension there. And a lot of times sales kind of complains about marketing. This particular case, um, sales kind of loved their marketing department. And when I asked them, yeah, exactly, they were like, oh, they're great. And they do wonderful things for me or whatever. And so kind of the standard line of questioning was, okay, well what do you think about the website? Like how could it do you know, help you better. And I'm kind of made me nervous because you know, we're going to have to do a really good job.:

Speaker 3:

8:21

Keeping this in mind is they said, well we kind of liked the website and it actually serves the purpose and it, it, it helps us in our sales in certain ways. And so, um, so there was almost a disconnect between, I felt like between marketing and sales marketing and said, hey, we need to redesign this and sales is like, I kind of like what we've got. And so now we're kind of having to make sure that we, we carefully blend those and make sure that we pull through those things that they think are valuable and the current website and make sure that it comes through the rep, the website redesigned. So it kind of makes this process a little bit harder actually. That's really interesting. I'm kind of curious, like what does. So what is the website doing that the sales team likes so much aside from sending them leads?:

Speaker 3:

9:04

Yeah. And it actually wasn't as much for leads. So in this particular case, they've got a relatively expensive sale, a long sales cycle. Uh, it's Btb, excuse me for a second. Um, it's, it's B to b, and um, what they kind of liked is, and we've talked about this before and some of the clients that we've worked together with, but is it sales support and sales enablement and allows them to go and grab the documents or the references that their current prospects and even current clients, because some of this is retention when we're talking about software, which is what we're talking about in this case. Um, and so they felt like it was their best resource to go and grab the things they needed to help their clients with or the things they needed to grab and help build up a business case for bringing their solutions in house.:

Speaker 3:

9:56

And so they were. So one of the big things is one, they felt the information was there that they needed to support those activities. And the other thing is it was organized in such a way that they knew how to find it. Um, and so that's kind of my concern now is we're probably, we think we're going to try to make it easier, but you know, they are comfortable and know where things are and then the really kind of interesting thing not to get too deep so that the client's not really identified or they know we've shared all this feedback but um, but the, the sales team actually has a internal resource to support them in their sales enablement. And a lot of the feedback I got is they actually don't use that because the website serves them better. Um, so then my only concern was, okay, that's great.:

Speaker 3:

10:44

Um, it's there and I'm, I'm glad the website is serving that function and making it easy for you. But then the second question was, okay, but does it serve the client or the new visitor? That's a customer, you know, is it to sales focused? But anyway, that's something to be discovered. But, but it was interesting. They have an internal resource to provide them all those materials and they said, hey, that tends to be out of date or it's more confusing or can't figure that out. It's much easier for me to go to the website, um, and use that. So that was, that level of coordination has kind of. It's almost extraordinary. I'm must be a very relaxing relationship to be in the middle of it by the way. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Alright, so let's go to the kind of, the second step of this I'm sure, and it's somewhat related, but analyzing the traffic and the conversion. So there's a couple of things that I run into all the time here is when I say that that's the first thing we want to look at is like, Hey, let's look at the traffic. Let's see what's happening there, how people are behaving, you know, where you're getting your traffic from. Kind of what that whole picture looks like. Um, and then take a look at what is actually producing conversions, what it's turning into. Leads are turning into a sale if you're doing transactions. That kind of staying. And invariably, what I run:

Speaker 3:

11:54

into is that neither one of those are in their field of view, so either they don't have analytics set up or search console and they don't know what it is or they just never look at it. Um, and so you got to do this step because there's a couple of things that often are happening when you take a look at that real quick for everybody. I wouldn't to explain the difference between analytics and search console analytics as a much more commonly understood, you know, component. Um, and even me, you know, I've been doing this for a long time as you know, I'm not quite as long as you have, but I haven't really started using search console consistently until like a year ago. Um, and now that I'm in there all the time, it's a super helpful, super helpful tool anyway. I, yeah. But yeah, how would you explain the difference between the two?:

Speaker 3:

12:41

Because there are similar in nature, but there's a distinct difference between them. Yeah, I think you go to, you go to them for different purposes for sure. Uh, and they can be. And they should be integrated so they can see everything from social console or at least the important things that are relevant to google analytics. So Google analytics, like you said, a lot of people are familiar with it. It shows you where your traffic's coming from, shows you what landing pages people are on, how long they're spending on your site. A lot of great information about sort of the behavior that's happening on your website, the google, the Google search console, which used to be a webmaster tools, which I think is a better description of it actually is kind of where you want to go in order to one, check the health of your website.:

Speaker 3:

13:20

And I'll tell you an example of where this kind of helped us detect a problem. Um, but it also, uh, so the second thing that it does, so the healthier website. The second thing is it gives you a kind of a view of what, how Google is perceiving your website. So it shows what they're seeing. So it's, it shows the type of searches that you're getting. It shows whether or not your site map is working. Um, and then the third thing is if there is a problem, a serious problem, Google will actually communicate through that first consult to you and give you the errors and the indications. And if you've got a really bad problem, they'll actually, there's a messaging functionality and they'll send you an email and say there's something amiss here. Um, so that's really important. Kind of the perfect example to just highlight why this would be important to you is we had one client, they were a little less capable kind of on the website front.:

Speaker 3:

14:14

They had multiple websites running which was causing duplicate content. They couldn't pull down, um, and they didn't have accurate sitemaps going into. And so as a result, um, google analytics wasn't showing all their traffic, um, and the, the Google wasn't indexing the right things. They were indexing sort of the reference material that they were given, which you can see in google in a google search console. That site map was actually saying, hey, Google, here's my, my pages to go look for. And because it was out of date, um, Google is seeing a bunch of [inaudible]. Um, and so that was causing us some problems. So Google search console is really important to kind of make sure that your house is in order as it pertains to Google, which is kind of everything, right?:

Speaker 1:

15:02

No, it's 100 percent everything. And, and you know, the thing that I actually use it for more often than not for some of our more advanced listeners. Right? So if you're using a tool like, um, a rafts or sem rush or you know, a third party, you know, we'll call it search engine optimization tool to either keyword discovery or track positions or whatever you're doing, you know, all of those tools are recreating what Google already knows to the best of their ability. Um, something you taught me to be and like it's not always accurate what you get out of there, it's close and it's close enough to create strategies from and learn a lot and, you know, focus your seo efforts. But when I see something weird in there, particularly pretending to like my brand searches or whatever else, I always go to google search console to either confirm or deny it.:

Speaker 1:

15:48

Um, and often it's, the problem is not nearly as outside because I thought it was like one of the third party tools tells me, um, or sometimes like the third party tool is missing something all together and it looks really good. Then you go to search console and you actually fundamentally recognize that like, oh no, that's a serious problem I have to fix. Um, so it's, it's a great sort of a, yeah, I don't know, like a mirror against the other tools that are kind of built a little bit differently to give you more global visibility and competitors and all that kind of jazz. Um, and make sure that you're still on the right track. Yeah, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a big fan. They just recently changed like the interface, which drives me nuts, but I'm the Google is always doing that. The second I learned any tool, they change it:

Speaker 3:

16:28

as it was maddening. Um, okay. So here's a. So those are kind of foundational elements that you should take a look at it to this even know like, okay, do I, do I have a problem that needs to be solved with a redesign or not and just gives you better information to kind of decide on your next step, which are now we'll get into some kind of strategies and tactics that we're starting to implement on sites that are given us some incremental outsized improvements to some of our performance. So I'm one of those kind of tips and tricks is a. and I got this off of a guy that I've started to follow him. Super Smart Guy, uh, Brady Shearer for pro church tools.com. And:

Speaker 1:

17:08

Oh, you were telling me about him as like the Yoda of church marketing. I love it.:

Speaker 3:

17:13

Yeah, no, he's. Yeah, if you were, you're in the church space and you're trying to figure out social media and even some web stuff. He does some great video work as well. Uh, you should definitely check this guy out. But one of the things I'm always looking at, like when, when you're trying to kind of figure out marketing strategy, I think it's really important to not consume a. So if you're looking at Gary v or you're looking at this guy or are you looking at anybody out there, be careful not to kind of get sucked into what they're presenting because that's for their user, right? And as, as a marketer who's trying to kind of figure out like, you know, smart strategies and tactics, some of these people that are doing things well and presenting well, I always like to try to step back and like, okay, what are they really doing?:

Speaker 3:

18:01

Like try to look behind the screen, so to speak. And so that's what I was doing on his website. I was like, oh, I like what he's doing or what are some of the things that he's doing? Forget about what he's presenting to me, but what is he doing? And one thing that I noticed that I really liked, um, and we're going to start implementing this on some websites, is he's obviously got a wordpress, I think it's wordpress website. And, you know, normally we think you've got blog posts and you put them into categories and those categories are kind of like high level topic areas or whatever. But he's subtly change the language from categories to playlist. And to me that was like, wow, because that immediately conveys to whoever that user is, um, the, the concept or the context of like a music playlist or maybe a playlist on youtube where, hey, this is a little piece of content in a much bigger, um, you know, grouping of content and you should listen to the whole thing, right?:

Speaker 3:

18:57

You should go through the whole playlist. And so to me, put my seo hat on. I'm like, I'm always playing for multiple page hits, right? I want to get them to do multiple page use in a session because that sends some great signals. And I think this concept of labeling and organizing things into playlist, um, will subconsciously psychologically move people through, uh, my content. And it makes a lot of sense because usually when we're publishing a blog post or we're doing a video or whatever, you know, we only got like five minutes worth of time or five minutes worth of view time and so I can only, I can only solve a little tiny piece of the bigger problem. And so if you had the bigger problem, like I don't want you jumping around and do another google search, I want you to go through all my content and solve the whole thing with me. And so I think playlist does that.:

Speaker 1:

19:47

That's such a simple solution to like a super common problem. And I often, I think that like people outsize, like if you're building a blog and you're a marketer and your responsibilities for growing traffic, right? Like it's the number one thing that, you know, whether it's your boss or your manager or whatever else, like they're going to come back to you and like we're building this publication or you know, this web presence and like are we growing traffic? And so often people are like focused on that almost exclusively. And I'm not telling, I'm not saying that's on wildly important thing to do, have you always want to be growing your traffic, but what I love about this solution is that it actually like really hones in on what's really more important metric and that's, you know, on your website and that's time on site or to, to your point b are, you know, pages visited.:

Speaker 1:

20:29

If someone comes to one page and bounces out, that's only a single opportunity to capture their email, to drive them further into your funnel or whatever else. And that's exactly the behavior they're going to go back to Google to find the next question that they want to answer. And their expectation I think is that when they come to, you know, even the most sophisticated blogs that you find on the web, it's a one experience. I mean, you know, even the, even the New York Times only has a, you know, a quote unquote like, oh, they usually. You might also like these articles, which is like a lame algorithm not really updated or paid attention to. And those articles are like rarely actually related to the thing that you're reading. So to come to a piece of content and then all of a sudden be served an organized, you know, systematic like, hey, this is all around this topic and you should enjoy these, you know, these seven other pieces of content I think is, it's such a small optimization, but the optimization that are the biggest are usually the smallest in nature. It's such a clever, clever play on words like, you know, if you called it a category, people wouldn't even click on it and they wouldn't even think of. It was like, oh, category, like what does that mean to me? But a playlist says, no, you need to play the full list. Right. It's, it's a verb, it's a verb.:

Speaker 3:

21:38

Totally. And I think there's a whole bunch of strategies and tactics embedded in that concept of, you know, just a lot of people that we run into just need to take the time to organize their website. They've been producing content forever, but they've never actually organized it, grouped it and put it together so that it's easy for the user to consume. So there's the concept of just organizing your content is kind of impacted by this concept as well. So the other one that's kind of related to the same sort of thing, which is a often something that we see is just people have been publishing content but they're not really doing it with any sort of like strategic. They just like they wake up in the morning and they produced something and they or they see something and they produce something. There's no real strategy behind what they're doing or why they're building these, you know, multiple pieces of content.:

Speaker 3:

22:26

So the next thing that I suggest doing is you probably have tons of content and when you go into your analytics, I've seen this like two or three times recently and it's, it's amazing that it happens, but I think maybe even Google is causing some of this because they're getting smarter about how their algorithm works. But I'll go into the analytics and I'll find. And the client usually is not even aware of this. I'll find that they have hundreds, maybe thousands of pages and 90 percent of the traffic is literally landing on like three to five pages on average Max. And so you have like, it's almost nerve wracking because you're like, okay, do I want to, I don't really want to tell the client because like, are they going to feel like, oh, this is sunk costs. This is lost money, you know, we, because we probably paid for a lot of this content.:

Speaker 3:

23:13

It's not like it's. So what I tell them is, no, no, we're going to leverage the heck out of this content and we're going to actually get it into view and we're going to, we're going to leverage all this so it's actually going to save you some time and effort and money creating kind of the next piece of content. Then we're going to start to consolidate, lengthen, and oftentimes diversify the content. So by, by diversifying, in most cases I'm saying let's add in a video or you know, some other sort of visual element into this content and we'll, we'll leverage that. And so we've, we've done this on a couple of clients where we take the, kind of, the highest level concept we find just because some of this may be hard for people to understand what I'm talking about. So we'll take like a high level, probably highly competitive search term and keyword probably at the top of the market kind of keyword.:

Speaker 3:

24:07

We'll find what page is either getting some version of that, um, traffic from that key word, right? So in something close, like it could be remotely related, but it has to be, not has to be, but if you have something that is related in any way, shape or form, and then you got to start. So if it's getting traffic, I find that page that's getting the most traffic. Ideally if it's in my top three to five, that's great. I got the, I got that anchor piece of content. If not, I'll have to figure out what it is and maybe I need to kind of create a new article that's very specific to that high level term. And then I gather up all the other content in that category. And I see. Can I take all that content and can I structure it in such a way that it becomes sort of a definitive guide to that key word and then I just take all that content and I literally in a Google doc, I copy and paste all that crap from all those and it could be 10 articles and I ended up with like, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 page article, right?:

Speaker 3:

25:09

And then I'm going to try to target for something between 1,520 500 words. Right? If you get above that, if there's leftover content, you can make an ebook and you make a lead magnet or something like that out of it. So don't waste any of that content. But then I'll just drill through and I'll edit that down into a nice 2000 word article. I use all that content, republish it, right? So I'm either updating the post or I'm creating the new post. And then this is really important because there is a little bit of traffic. There's probably a couple of visitors to each one of those pages over the month. I'm going to do three or one redirects, all those pages so that one cornerstone piece of content and I'm telling you, we have had movements into the first page by simply doing that. And then the traffic just blows in.:

Speaker 3:

25:55

Um, and so, uh, by, by a combination of three because I kinda gives us its initial juice to get google to pay attention and then a blast to the top. So, um, and I can't take complete credit for this. This is actually a tip or an idea that I got from Neil Patel is awesome. By the way. I just recently started digging into his, like Seo, very seo specific, you know, tips or whatever. And like I've been, I've been impressed because I, you know, as a mom, as a rand Fishkin guy forever and I still have great advice. I'm from Iran, but I find Neil's like more actionable, almost like he really breaks it down into tiny tidbits and you know, and it's like, hey, focus on this one thing now. And you know, it gives you something to actually do at the end of it. Yeah. Not that people shouldn't listen to us, but like I highly recommend checking into Neil Patel's seo advice.:

Speaker 3:

26:47

It's really fantastic. Yeah, definitely. But I'm unapologetic. Like I steal ideas all the time, right? You gotta go out to the point. Exactly. That's why they convey. Um, and, and I'm telling you this one works. This is tested, tried and true. I've done this on several key words, so work, so get that content, cobble it together and put it into something more definitive. And it's an old lesson. I mean, I worked for a lead generation company and actually our only term for content was to create a guide and we were always doing stuff like that. I don't know why I would've ever gotten away from that, but um, but it works. All right, next step. Our next tip is kind of related to this, especially the diversifying content piece. And again, people are making fun of me because I'm quoting brady a lot, but brady also Kinda sorta does this, uh, and he's a great video guy.:

Speaker 3:

27:38

I'm not. But it doesn't matter, I'm going to do it anyway, and that is to have a video on each and every page. Um, and so we're actually for Kalydeco is content creation. We flip the funnel a little bit. Um, so what we used to do in the past is we come up with a content because we're seo guys and that was all written back in the day and so what we would do is, um, you know, come up with a concept, come up with a keyword that we're going after and then we'd write an article and then we might think about trying to do something like a video or something like that. Now what we're doing, and this is actually because my schedule is, is become crazy. It's actually a little bit easier for me now. So I'll flip on the camera. I've got my office all set up so that it's ready to go.:

Speaker 3:

28:28

I flipped on the camera, I, you know, dump it out to video. I tried to get a little bit organized. I do bullet points that I will definitely have some bullet points written out, dump it to camera. Um, keep that to less than 10 minutes. Boom. That's my youtube video. And then from there and I find it does get better sometimes I rerecord the video after I write, then I write the article. Um, and then sometimes I'll rerecord the video if I've [inaudible] for me. I right to think. So it probably hurts me a little bit, but for the average person and kind of the way they think it probably will work really well. And again, idea came from somewhere, right? So, um. Oh, why did I just blank his name? The close Io guy? I'm Kelly. Yeah, Steli Efti. Um, so I got it from him and he, I somewhere I read like he was kind of wasn't creating content and his right hand guy said like, dude, you're killing me. We have to get all this great content out there and I know you don't like to write, so just spit it out on video and I'll write the article for you. And that's what he did. And they were a content machine. They are a content machine. So I ripped that idea off too. But it, you got to do it. I love it. It's my favorite pieces, like, you know, when:

Speaker 1:

29:42

you shared your show notes with me for a day and like what we were going to talk about, it's by far my number one goal and my favorite piece of advice in this, in this whole scenario, the most underused thing. And people suffer this almost more than anybody and you know, this be an art because when we were working together, like one of the first things that I did when we, when I came on the client call, I was like, oh we need video. Like we need a video department. And, but it wasn't video for Seo at that point. It was like creative video for fanciness in general. Um, and, and so like, not that that was a bad thing, but like I love beautiful, amazing video. But this piece of advice is like, look, it sounds stupid when you say it out loud because of course it is, but like youtube is the second largest search engine in the world and people hang out there all the time.:

Speaker 1:

30:29

And you know, search algorithm is going to pick up that video and either put it below the snippet for you on the pages that you need to rank for or whatever else. So from an Seo perspective, it's great. And furthermore, like you just don't know how your audience wants to consume the information you're giving them. Some people are going to watch what to watch a video, some people want to read it, some people want to put the video on in the background and just listen. Um, but I love the whole idea of just flipping your process, make the video first. If it's a simple concept, it doesn't have to be well edited, it doesn't have to be like totally high production value. In fact, your audience kind of expects you to do more of a, you know, a diy approach to things. Um, that was an article I shared with you.:

Speaker 1:

31:07

I think it was last week. It was a medium thing about, uh, what was it called, you know, like the Oh, the real housewives of. Oh yeah, yeah. It's the how. So everybody listening knows and like you should check it out because it's cool. I'm drifts not only as a software as cool, but the way that they're doing their marketing, um, it really gives you like a viewpoint like into the lives and world of people who work at drift and it's all kind of driven by their vp or marketing. His name is Dave. Um, and yeah, like every other video he makes, it's like him walking on the street like sipping juice or I don't know, hey, it's just him in his cell phone and the contents. Amazing because it has some personality to it and whatever else. So trust in yourself, trust that you have good ideas and you're trying to convey something to your, to your audience and just be yourself on the video and do that. Even when bill and I were working together, I would, I would harass you all the time to create more content. It's like this is a, this is a great way to do that. It's amazing. It's so, so now I'm finally listened to go now. Yeah. Well, I think that's, it's:

Speaker 3:

32:06

too, like, uh, I know Chris Brogan is talked about doing more video in 2019 other, a great guy to, to kind of check out and watch. Um, but one of the things he talks about or has been talking about lately is like, I think there's lots of barriers to us. Like we don't like the way we look or like these, all these weirdo things. But I think truly what attracts people to video and attracts people to kind of the names. Um, uh, you know, the people that were watching the youtubers, what attracts us to them is, is really that of reality show insight. So I'm one of the things we're working with a couple of people to kind of build some, uh, some personalities if you will. Um, and one of the things that I've been coaching is like, Hey, even in your field, your shot, if you will, um, live ended up look at like how Gary Vee does things, how Chris Brogan does things, how a Peter Mckinnon who was like, he's a lights out video guy.:

Speaker 3:

33:05

So like, he's going to be way more than most of us can do, but in all cases there's a, there's a component there where they're in their backdrop is their personality. And so I'm actually doing this. You'll, you'll see this in some videos. I took some pictures today. Um, and I'll put those in the show notes, but I'm trying to build out the backdrop so you could see a little bit of my personality. Um, what things are interesting, what things I like, um, maybe even put some Easter eggs in there, which I've seen a lot of people doing. So make that a part of you because people will be drawn into the video and they'll be listening to you. But there'll be like, oh, what the heck is on his bookshelf? Oh, that guy's got a light saber on his bill. He's a star wars guy.:

Speaker 3:

33:42

So am I, you know, oh, there's a walking dead, you know, um, thing on there. And so I think that's something that's really important. The second component of that is, um, to shoot some behind the scenes footage. Like people want to know what you're doing throughout your day. What, I mean, this sounds silly, but it's true. I even find myself Kinda kinda looking at this stuff is like, I want to know what they're doing, you know, day to day, how they organize their day, what things consume them, what things distract them, what does their desk look like, what is their office look like? Do they work at home, do they work for office? All those things are a little like extra personality, reality show type stuff that I think if you add to your content, you really build up that loyal fan base. Well, there's two elements to that, right?:

Speaker 3:

34:30

Which I think, which gravitates me towards, um, I think you pronounced his name, gearhart, Dave here at drift. The David drifts. One of the things I really like about them is like, okay, here's the guy that's, you know, working for a software company, um, that is scaling rapidly. And when I say rapidly, I mean almost dropbox rapidly and in all basically on their organic and sort of like, you know, word of mouth and like all that kind of. So all the covenant things that any marketer wants, right? I like to create buzz around their, their product, but he's not, he's not a superhero, he's just a regular guy. Smart, he's clever. Um, more more importantly, he's curious and like what he brings out in his videos is that curiosity, him discovering things. Um, and so I think, you know, when bill, when you say like, let people into the, like the behind the scenes stuff, it's, it goes all the way back to the Gary Vee Mantra, which is like document don't create. Yeah, no, that's, that's a key point. Um, and so if you just document what you do and how you do it, um, if you're doing it well then people will gravitate towards that and then you'll be creating content like while you're actually solving problems, which is a, you know, which is kind of an interesting way to approach it. Do not by the, as we always told:

Speaker 1:

35:38

our clients, like, you know, do not fill in the company Christmas party. Nobody cares about or the birthday parties and your cake for your birthday party. Or like the day that sandy brought cake pops into the office like nobody cares about that. What they want to know is you know, who you are and how that relates to how you do your job and how you solve the problems that everybody is like confronting on a daily basis. You do that and do it around this way and I think you're, you know, you're onto something. It takes commitment though. And it does take time. I'm the one thing I read in that article which I thought was really funny is uh, you know, the guy was writing about how do I measure, you know, doing video like this or like treating my website in such a manner since we are talking about websites, like how do you manage the Roi of that?:

Speaker 1:

36:19

I'm already measure its effects. And the Gary v's response was how do you, how do you calculate the Roi of your mother? Which, you know, he's a harsh dude for sure, but like the point he's making is like some of the things that you're going to do and we talk about lead generation a lot are not going to be directly attributable to like lead that goes to sale and like you have to live in a world in which that's okay. Um, it's something that I think I've learned more about vr since leaving Kalydeco and kind of working on the, on the company side is that we had a mantra Kalydeco. Like we'd never talk about vanity metrics. Right. You know, is this something I use in pitches all the time, like I'm never going to come to a meeting and tell you how many impressions your ad campaign got because who cares?:

Speaker 1:

37:03

Um, and in certain aspects of digital marketing that's true. Like, you know, when it comes to advertising, like you don't want to talk about impressions and that's all labeled. It talks about video and organic traffic and like, you know, sometimes that blog post is generating 10,000 views a month for you and you're getting views on that video. And like you can't see that it's directly converting, but if you do a temporal analysis between the number of leads you're getting and the growth of that particular blog post and you see a trend, that trend is not like happenstance. It's happening for a reason. And that's the kind of stuff.:

Speaker 3:

37:31

Yeah. So true. I mean because I mean, what are we talking about here is influence, right? I mean it's just how many people are you influencing and when does that influence turn into revenue? It's really hard to connect all the dots. And even in the old days of offline advertising, nobody even tried to connect the dots. But um, but anyway, so, but we, we have this kind of, you know, I dunno this fantasy that we can track every little thing and sometimes it doesn't even make sense to do that even though digital makes it easier. Okay. Let's kind of know, move through on this topic. It's kind of all related to your hearing kind of these themes because we kind of just because they all are, they all are so intertwined that we'd kind of just stumble into each of these together and the other one, and this is related to video or any type of content to your comment about documenting, but we're actually going to do another podcast or I'm going to do another video because I've got a lot of requests for this. It's like how do you come up with content ideas? If you're just documenting what you're doing there, you will never have. You never run out of content ideas, so:

Speaker 1:

38:33

every yet too many you don't know which one to focus. Yeah, that's the next thing is like:

Speaker 3:

38:36

when, when you're talking about your website, are you coaching your clients and when I'm talking about coaching your clients, there's a couple of different things you could take this to mean and he probably should be doing in that coaching. One is it's okay to coach them and exactly what you actually sell them, right? It's like this, this concept of you're going to hold something back or give that always just delivers an awful customer experience because you're usually holding back stuff that's probably not as valuable as you thought it was. Um, and it definitely leaves a big hole in the conversation of whether or not you can accomplish something of value for them. So, so the one thing is like it's okay to coach them and have them experience exactly what they're going to experience when they hire you or they buy your product. So it's okay to kind of give away the farm.:

Speaker 3:

39:21

The other thing though that I think is really important to keep in mind if you are coaching your clients, essentially what you're doing is you're, you're coaching the sale. So if I can gain enough influence and I can coach you as to the way that you look at the world with my website, when that salesperson talks to you, you're already, you're already believing my philosophy, right? Um, and that's what I want. When I deliver a lead to a salesperson, I want that lead. I want that, that prospect to already believe in my philosophy. Um, and so that's what you can do with your website, that's what you can do with your online marketing. And so try to figure out how to coach your client and how to teach them and make them evangelists for your philosophy on how you do things as a company that probably differentiates you from everybody else.:

Speaker 3:

40:11

It could be your culture, it could be the way you actually, your product actually works. It could be your philosophy of how to solve problems. You will have to kind of determine what that is, but whatever that is, whatever that differentiator is, man, coach it into your lead. So then when that salesperson picks it up, I'm the person that other in keeps going. Yup, Yup, Yup. Not In their head, right? Because they've heard it, right? Believe it. No, I totally agree. I think everything and when you're thinking about, you know, since we're talking about website redesigns, I think often people want to redesign their website. Um, you know, me included by the way because they've got these different audiences they want to talk to you slightly differently and your maybe your website right now as long as serving like one of those audiences. But one of the things that you just said reminded me of this idea that like the coaching your clients, which really coaching them on the sale to me is it all hinges on the change that you're creating for them.:

Speaker 3:

41:02

Right? So whether it's a service or software or a product or whatever else, there's the state that they exist in before your product or service and then there's the state that they exist in after. And then what that changes is the coaching that you're creating, right? You're either solving a problem for them, it's like a global problem, you know, maybe the world in which they operate is changing and your service or product is going to allow them to be more competitive in that new world or whatever the case might be. But like no matter who, even if your audience segments into various different, like slightly more specific, all:

Speaker 1:

41:34

of them have to live within the world of like that, that changing world. So if you can communicate that first and put them down the path and I think that's a better way to think about it. I liked the way that you classify that Vr is it's super important to kind of keep things as ultra simple as possible and I think we all have a tendency to want to list benefits or list values or, or whatever else in like you're, you may be solving many small problems, but there's one big problem you're solving with your product or service and make sure that sits front and center lift.:

Speaker 3:

42:02

Totally. Okay. So we're running tight on time as we always do. So I'm going to go through these next two real quick and actually probably both of them deserve a separate sort of hole. Are you telling me I talked to you much? No, not at all. I've got too much. I had too many ideas for 2019 I think is what we've come together. We've got too many, too many ideas for these, these folks to kind of pick one and try and that's really important to like try something on this list. Don't just listen to it and say, oh yeah, that sounds really cool. Actually do something or start one of these things today that's so important and just kind of taking action. All right. The next one, uh, this came because as all of these ideas do, they came because of something I was doing with the client. So we were kind of running down towards the end of the year. We're trying to kind of choose revenue for everybody. And one particular client, I was like, hey, why don't we just send out an extra email because he had a, he has a really good list. Um, and this is something that we don't do enough for client, for whatever reason. Clients don't seem to be believe in email the way I do. So we don't have as many email clients as I would like to, but:

Speaker 1:

43:04

I think they worry that it's going to be obnoxious. Like they're emailing too much and I don't think there's, I don't really think you can do. It sucks:

Speaker 3:

43:09

because like in this case I was like, hey, why don't we send an email? And so I shot out an email and we've got an extra five grand in revenue to Kinda end out the. I mean just like instantly five grand. Right? And we had one client, you and I worked on cash. Oh my gosh, ms dot every time we send an email, 30,000 plus. Right? So like if you're, if you're in any way you've got investors and you have to hit some quarterly numbers or you're publicly traded and you got to hit quarterly numbers, man, you've got to have an email list and it's got to be massive and you've got to intentionally work on it because there is no easier way to close the shortfall. Then a handful of well crafted emails at the right time.:

Speaker 1:

43:49

Totally. And don't be discouraged by. I remember the client you're talking about. And of course the first email we sent, everybody did not earn $30,000. I'm like, it. Remember with email, and this is something you taught me, bar, you are like, you're building a behavior with your audience. If you email them once a month, then they're going to ignore you all the time. If you start emailing a dead list once a week, you're going to get a bunch of unsubscribes, but that's okay. That's what you want. You want to clean that list. You want to make sure it's healthy and then you want to remain consistent. I've, you know, I've never, I don't care how bad your emails are, if you don't send them consistently that no one's ever going to open them and read them. It has to be consistent. Um, guess. So my question to you is, was that client sending emails consistently or because you're a magic man, did you just go ahead and pull that $5,000 out of it?:

Speaker 3:

44:36

That one we were doing consistently, but I did have another client, um, where we had a, um, so financial services, mortgage, um, and we had a list that was pretty significant Kinda to, to illustrate some of the point you were making there. Um, so it was people that had either been leads before they called contact, maybe even done a mortgage with before. So there were some familiarity with the brand because they had engaged these leads before they were sitting on an email list. They had not touched that list for like six months because they just kind of fallen asleep with the value of that. So I'm like, okay, let's send out a, you know, let's send out a email. And I was shocked. Um, we sit on email and it was, it was a pretty much a straight up offer like, hey, let's go do this and turn you into a mortgage lead.:

Speaker 3:

45:23

Um, and uh, we did that. Our unsubscribe rate was like point one, which is actually pretty typical for just a regular, like weekly email to get some level depending on the size of your list. And we made a few hundred bucks and I'm in Leeds as far as like, what, you know, what's the impact of the results of that? And um, you know, so that was sitting on the shelf for six months. So you would think they would all hate you. And unsubscribed like mad and they certainly wouldn't take your offer, but those were, those were mortgage leads, those were mortgage deals, um, that if we hadn't sent that email, uh, the loan officers would have never uncovered through their own process. Right. So, um, so you've got to, got to do that.:

Speaker 1:

46:08

One of my mantras for 2019 is definitely going to be a, there's no such thing as a dead lead, like it just does not exist if you just treat all of your leads are what age they are or whatever else is like an opportunity, an opportunity to be scored by the way, like you don't want to be, you know, spending time doing outbound calling against leads. They're like eight months old or something like that. Um, but all of them have opportunity within them. And so you find the most efficient ways to wake them up and email. There's no more efficient way to do that. Then with email. Yeah. I:

Speaker 3:

46:37

mean, if your industry has the concept of age leads floating around, which they probably do, that you can purchase a to your point, like you can make a ton of Roi on that because they're not dead. Um, and even if they are like, one of the things that I've been teaching the, the folks, and this is financial services, insurance and mortgage a lot, they, they, they kind of deal in the age leads department. But one of the things that I talk about there is just switching your mentality even for sales. If you've got a database with a bunch of old leads in it, change the way that you approach that lead and the way that you engage that prospect instead of thinking of it as. Because this is often what we do. We try to engage them the same way we have to do a fresh lead, which of course they're not right.:

Speaker 3:

47:21

And instead approach them as a past client. So whenever you talk to them, whenever you leave a voicemail, when you know, you should act like you should talk, like you should use assumptive language that essentially says to them, hey your, you know, a client of mine or we talked back when and so treat them more like a past client that needs to be reengaged instead of like, Hey, let's get you into, you know, this latest and greatest software or let's get you into a mortgage or whatever as if they had just inquired with you because then that sounds awful, right?:

Speaker 1:

47:56

Yeah, it's totally disruptive. It's A. Yeah. And then they see right through it. People value transparency and authenticity and like that's a larger topic of course,:

Speaker 3:

48:04

for sure. Okay. Last one, and this is kind of my thought behind this one was your conversations are conversations about drift and that's be present and available for your clients. And so there's a concept of chat bots and live chat and that sort of thing. I think customers are getting more comfortable with that interaction, um, and are expecting it more. But if you're not there, you got to look at something like drift that allows you to, with some ai or something, sort of simulate that to a point when the salesperson can actually engage you. You certainly don't want to send them to dead air or like, oh, sorry, nobody's here. We're going to do. We're just going to take you in as an email anyway. You know, so figuring out a way to always be present for your client and give them those kinds of things. And you're, you know, kind of a, a proponent of drift. So maybe you can add to the value of that.:

Speaker 1:

48:56

Yeah, I mean, I think what would drift is doing with their software specifically like their marketing team aside, which is awesome. They've got lots to teach. I'm on the marketing strategy side, but the software itself, it's just a really a simplified, like beautiful way to engage clients that come to your website. And to be clear, by the way, when drift built this offer for themselves or for like a client, I can't remember. Like their origin story. Exactly. They killed all the, like all the, what do you call it, forms on their website. They don't have it. If you go to the drift website, there's no form interesting. Um, and so and so everything comes through there. This bot which is basically a chat bot and engage with somebody and ask them questions that they need to know, have answers. The engagement with the BOT itself to me says that the person on the other end is interested so it's doing a little bit of lead scoring for you upfront.:

Speaker 1:

49:45

Then it's qualifying the lead for you and then by that time someone is available to speak to that particular client. So it's, it's definitely a better way to scale web chat and then just like the open, oh, lark chat box or you know, or the open chat box period, which you can do at drift or tools like intercom or you know, that kind of things that's still available like papa chat on a certain page and actually start an active conversation. Um, but what the software does is just allow you to put a human face on a automated technology. And, and the way they teach you to do it too is like, don't, don't try to fake that. It's a real person, like, no, just tell them like for example, if you go to the website, there are things called the drift, but you know, whenever they eat, when they market to me, they're like [inaudible], they're awesome.:

Speaker 1:

50:27

This, I get videos from trips, salespeople all the time. Um, because obviously been, I've been all over their website, like, you know, just checking it out or whatever, but they always send me videos and they, you know, they call my thing the shell bought because I work at a nutshell. Here's your shell bought and they, they mock it up and it's in a video and they show up with, it looks like on a website, like again, to your point, just always being present and available for, for clients. And if I were to jump on drifts website right now because of their technology and their crm by the way, um, they would know exactly who I was. The Bot would engage me as such. And then a salesperson would pick me up almost. Okay.:

Speaker 3:

50:56

Oh, super nice. It's definitely the nut netbooks though for you guys.:

Speaker 1:

51:02

I don't know if I can get that best.:

Speaker 3:

51:04

Oh Man. Yeah. I need to check that out more because I think that's super valuable and like I said, I think even just the curiosity of chatbots, people I think are engaging them just out of curiosity and fun and hey, uh, starting a conversation, even if it's kind of a junkie, throwaway conversation is something, right? So we're getting people to engage with the website. Spend some time on it. Alright, we're gonna wrap this one up. Uh, I love being back in the saddle with you, Mike. Um, we were definitely going to make this, um, uh, we're not going to take any time off for the next one, so we're going to boom, boom, boom, boom.:

Speaker 1:

51:36

Oh, it's a recurring calendar. Click. It's not yet. We will not ask.:

Speaker 3:

51:39

So I'm excited. Uh, as always, if you like it, leave comments, uh, upvoted, whatever, wherever you're listening to it. Give us some, uh, some up votes and, and comments like, tell us what you want to hear and, and what's exciting to you. Uh, look for our videos and that sort of thing too, because I'm going to start doing some of those. And so anyway, we're just trying to be helpful in 2019. That's a big one. The other thing too, last thing we usually talk about like, Hey, what suggestions or whatever, and I'll give you time if you've got one, but my biggest suggestion and why this whole thing Kinda came together in 2019 is go out there and pay attention that to people that you respect and you follow and you like and that are doing good things and take a look, you know, that one layer deeper and really kind of analyze what they're doing and figure out how you can kind of improve your own performance and what you're doing, but you know, not only giving them Kudos for, for what they're doing, but also improve it by flattering them, by putting it into your own kind of mix.:

Speaker 3:

52:41

And so I've done that with the Brady and Gary and Chris and you know, so find some people that you love and you admire and um, and one give them credit for how smart they are and to try to figure out how to improve yourself with their mentorship.:

Speaker 1:

52:58

Yeah, I mean, my, my suggestion for the first episode of Twenty 19, it's something you said earlier and I totally agree with it, which is a super simple thing which is do something. If you go out and you and you're reading an article, you're like, man, that's a really clever idea. Don't bookmark it. Don't put it in a list. Don't shelve it for later, like pick a thing and go and do it and try it. You're never going to get anything done. And I'm guilty of this as well because I love consuming information about marketing strategy and all that kind of stuff. And you take in too much. But second you see something that really grabs your attention, you know, without derailing your entire business. Like go ahead and stop and try it. If you don't try it, you're never going to get it to work and remember that rarely does anything work on the exact first time, but even the slightest little positive result from something you try should give you the energy and like the hope so to speak. They're like, oh, if I. okay, this is actually working. If I focus my attention on it, I can really get the, you know, the growth that I'm looking for from it. You gotta try it. You got it, brother. Holy Cow. Almost an hour. We're out. We're out.:

Speaker 2:

53:57

All right bro. I'll talk to you later. You everybody. Thanks for listening to collide because make the logo bigger. Podcast. Leave your comments and reviews wherever you download your podcast. Find us on the web@Kalydeco.com. K A l e I d I c o.com.: